Casual Games Harmony

Tomorrow is our big day. Ancient Quest of Saqqarah will be launched on the first portal, namely BigFishGames. The game will be available exclusively on BigFish for two weeks in exchange for a small promotion campaign. After that time it will hopefully appear on all major portals. Of course please remember that the game was first soft-launched on Game Club Cafe and our users are enjoying the full version for almost two weeks now.  Anyway, the coming weeks and days will finally show what our game is ultimately worth. We are very nervous, so please keep your fingers crossed for us!

As you might know we’re currently very busy preparing localized builds of StoneLoops, finalizing Saqqarah, trying to port our games to Mac and negotiating a lot of agreements as we are trying hard to successfully self-publish our current titles. It all takes a lot of time and effort but there is nothing of big interest to write about, so I have decided to add the Spellscape soundtrack to the game music section. Sorry, no singing this time… Anyway, you may remember me writing a short postmortem of this first Codeminion game several days ago, but in case you missed it you can still find it here.

Yesterday we have launched Game Club Cafe, our premium casual games distribution portal. Like with most our projects we had many problems developing the website (don’t ask me why is that - we probably are cursed or something). We had to limit the scope of the project several times and it took very very very long to complete, but finally the first version of the website is online. Currently Game Club Cafe has a selection of 112 games. All of them were handpicked and we believe that it is the single best catalogue of high quality casual games from all over the Internet. Be sure to bookmark the website because we will be adding more new quality games on a regular basis.

Continue reading “Best games on Game Club Cafe”

Currently I’m on a short vacation at the Baltic Sea with my dogs so I won’t be blogging for several days due to limited Internet access. But please stay tuned as I have already started putting together several interesting articles that I would like to post during the next week. I will be writing about the methods we use at Codeminion to make our game downloads small and I will also give you an update on the status of Saqqarah beta. And in case you have missed it, the free launch of Pteroglider Full Version as well as it’s music soundtrack are getting most of the attention on my blog these days.

In case you haven’t noticed I have launched a Game Music Section here on the Casual Games Harmony blog. It will feature various soundtracks I did for our games as well as other compositions I created over the years.

Currently the Game Music Section only has the music from Pteroglider and some samples from cgMusic, but I will be adding more tracks from my other projects on a regular basis. Most of my compositions are instrumental pieces so Pteroglider’s electronic soundtrack is not what I usually do. I remember that after the launch of the game we received several reviews on the Internet. One review author was even generous enough to include a single sentence summarizing my music! I remember it till this day, because it went like this:

Continue reading “Game Music Section: Pteroglider Soundtrack”

The short answer is -  yes they can. The long one is – yes, they can and in fact they do it better than most people. I’m not talking about computers performing music (like a MIDI Player or a Toyota robot playing violin). I’m talking about computer software that is composing music - making up melodies and writing scores for some instruments. The only thing which gives us, people an edge at composing music is that a real person can tell which one composition sounds better than others. A computer can create hundreds of songs in a second but it will never be able to tell which one it likes the most. But let’s get back to the beginning…

Continue reading “cgMusic - Can computers create music?”

When you look at our website it may seem that not a lot is going on. But on the contrary the moments when our website is quiet are probably the ones when we have a lot of work. Just to give you a small idea of what’s coming up here is a list of things that we are currently working on:

• Anceint Quest of Saqqarah BETA version (for PC and Mac)
• Saqqarah Teaser Trailer
• StoneLoops! of Jurassica Mac version
• StoneLoops! of Jurassica localized versions (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish and Russian)
• StoneLoops! of Jurassica flash webgame
• Premium game distribution website
• One second party unannounced game in early preproduction
• Two in-house unannounced games in the design phase

As you see we have a lot of work. And apart from this we also need to handle the business part of running the company, distribution of games already launched, provide support for our customers and maintain our websites. This is a lot of work, especially for a team of 6.

Yes this is the 13’th post of Casual Games Harmony, which is a major milestone for me as this is my very first blog. I’m not a superstitious person, but I didn’t want to risk writing about Saqqarah in the 13’th post - especially after StoneLoops! not performing up to our expectations on the first 3 portals it was recently launched on.

Anyway, misfortune is one of those things that you won’t find playing casual games. At least in the properly designed ones. Whenever you find your barbarian suddenly equipped with a Fizbin of Misfortune (Army Morale -2) she can’t throw away or you find that your dinosaurs suddenly destroyed the fences and left your dinosaur theme park, there is a good chance you are playing a hardcore game. The best casual games can give you satisfaction and immersion rivaling the best mainstream titles, but even the worst casual games will never frustrate you on par with some of the hardcore gaming classics. After all if they do frustrate then they are simply not casual anymore!

I realized today that this blog is targeted at both game developers as well as gamers and some of you might not know what the hell I’m talking about in certain posts. This is why I decided to launch a FAQ section that I will be updating with both obvious and not so obvious things and definitions so that all of you can enjoy the full capacity of this blog. If you’re not sure about something just post a comment and I will try to post clarifications in the FAQ section.

Todays date marks the launch of my Casual Games Harmony blog. Please look at the about page to see if the topics about to be covered are matching your interest. If they are, remember that you can always subscribe to the rss feed.

Writing a blog is a new experience for me, but nevertheless I will try to post only interesting and valuable things. As you probably have noticed the blog is hosted on the Codeminion server, which means that most of the articles will revolve around my work. Hopefully you will be reading interesting things about casual game development and running an independent game development company real soon. I will be encouraging other people from Codeminion (most notably Konrad, my business partner) to create blogs of their own, so you can have a better picture of our approach towards casual games.

If you have any questions or just want to contact me, feel free to comment on any of the recent posts.